Three and half weeks ago I suddenly remembered that my eighth blog ‘birthday’ was coming up on March 6th, and I decided then, that that would be the day that I would kill it.

Eight years is a long time. I mean, I talked about this a bit in my last post – eight years is one of the longest periods of times that I have committed to anything. I don’t really know how to say any of this because it’s 10.27pm and I’ve just been at a dinner and I’ve had 3 glasses of wine and it’s all kind of a weird emotional thing for me but basically I think it’s just time to move on from the whole ‘Katherine is Awesome’ blog and start fresh.

You might know already but this whole thing started kind of as a joke. My best friend Kate, her boyfriend bought her ‘kateisawesome.com’ (which no longer exists) and then to be funny (I think?), my then work colleague, Nivin, bought me ‘katherineisawesome.com’ for my birthday and set up a blog on it and got my friends to all comment happy birthday messages (this post no longer exists). It was nice at the time, but I didn’t think much of it (you have to remember, this was over eight years ago so blogging was nowhere near as prolific as it is now), but like with everything in my life, I just fell into posting, and on March 6th, 2009, I put up my first post about this basic as Witchery shoe (that I did end up buying) and then I was on a roll.

I think about my life back then and my life now and as much as I am embarrassed about so many of those old posts, I have no regrets. This blog opened up opportunities for me that I would never have had otherwise. I owe my current life to this blog. It’s how I met so many of my good friends. It’s how I met Maddy Budd! It’s how I met Ella! It’s how I got my current job. It’s how I met Kanye West. It’s how I got to visit Sweden, how I got to see my first ever Burberry show, it’s how I (re)met my boyfriend, even. It’s why I started (and stopped lol) running! I mean, it’s why I started fucking exercising! There are so many links I want to post here, like that blog post about the random guy who sent me a dick pic or that one about my thoughts on Hallensteins bringing Playboy bunnies to NZ, but if I do that I will feel too sad.

I won’t go into all the reasons why katherineisawesome.com is getting the lethal injection today because I feel like it’s sort of obvious and it’s been a little while coming, but I do want to say thank you to every person who has taken some of their precious time and spent it reading my posts. Whether you hated it or loved it or were disgusted or embarrassed or you rolled your eyes a million times or whether you sent me a comment or whether you skim-read it, I appreciate it so much. Also to all the people who have helped create the content – PR’s, brands, models, photographers, friends – thank you a million.

So what now?

My friend Lani (who I met through blogging lol) and I are starting a little project. It will be fresh but also familiar. I mean, it is basically the parts I really love about this blog, on another blog, mixed with things she likes too. And maybe some other things from women we know and like. My whole plan was to have it live today so I could send you there, but in true Lani and Katherine form, we are both lazy and it won’t be ready for a couple of weeks. I can tell you this now, though – it will be called ‘Rally‘ and I hope you will visit sometime.

A pixelated thing from the internet that James sent this to me, it’s a still from Enter The Void.

Ha! I think have achieved a personal best. The last time I was logged into here was on the 14th of November, 2016. 2016! God, what a ride. But also, not really a ride at the same time because I honestly can’t think of anything that happened in the last three and a half months that would really be of any interest. That is how boring I am now, because I’m old and I’m in a stable relationship and I have a stable job and basically I don’t want to say it but I’m ‘settled’.

I remember when I was really cranking with this blog. I was all over the show, I was doing mad tings. I was in this relationship that wasn’t one, but I was trying to make it one or pretend I didn’t care that it wasn’t one, I was pretending that blogging was my job but in reality I was being paid like, hardly anything but I was able to live and go to cafés and take photos of my food and buy clothes and take photos of my clothes because I lived at my moms and paid a nominal amount to be there. What a bloody time to have a blog in New Zealand. What great timing.

But we are coming up to eight years of being online, paying for this domain name and talking about myself like people give a fuck, typing whatever I want on a semi-regular basis (regardless of whether it’s good or not) and I have been thinking to myself – eight years is a fucking long time. In fact, I was driving home from my stable job (lol) today and I was thinking to myself, about how long eight years really is:

Eight years is older than Ben’s son, Oli. This blog has existed longer than that human has been around. Mind blowing.

Eight years is longer than any romantic relationship I’ve ever had.

Eight years and I still have not managed to get my Full drivers license.

So, that is all kind of just mumble-jumble, stream of consciousness shit. I am here to tell you some Highs and Low(e)s of the last three and a half months, on the day before the last day of February. Here I go:

When my good friend Lani told me (she never asked, lol) that I was going to be her first guest (aka trial interviewee) on her new podcast she was doing with Ben I was kind of hesitant. I mean, I never told her this at the time but I am wary of in-person, on-phone, ‘live’ type interviews because I get nervous, I kind of hate the sound of my voice, I don’t think I’m very good at censoring myself (will panic if put on the spot), and I’m not as articulate as I could be if given the chance to edit my answers. Also, you may not know this but Lani has a Journalism degree and she’s worked as reporter for Radio New Zealand - INTIMIDATING.

On top of that, I knew she was going to ask me about my background and my race, and as much as it probably seems like I love talking about that stuff, I am also really aware that the last time I did that quite publicly, I got a bunch of hate mail so it almost sometimes feels like it’s not worth it.

But hey, like I said – she told me I was doing it, and she’s almost a foot taller than me, so I did. (Jokes.)

The podcast is called Snacks and Chats. I’m pretty sure the name was made up on the spot in our interview – you can read more about it here but basically Lani is the interviewer, Ben is the producer and when they record the podcast there is chatting and eating of snacks. This first series of interviews is based on Lani’s ‘I thought I recognised her’ blog posts. Like I said – read more about it here.

Last night I asked Lani what she loved most about podcasts, her immediate answer was “Stories - learning shit, and hearing people tell interesting and engaging stories. Sometimes they are comforting – I like to be made to consider/think about things in ways I may not have.”

So there you have it. Snacks and Chats podcast went live today, you can listen to it here and for the next few Mondays. (I can’t promise my interview will blow your mind but there are some other interviewees in the coming weeks that will!)

Yesterday was Halloween and we had three sets of trick-or-treaters come to our house. The first guy lucked out. He arrived with his witchy-dressed mother, tiny plastic pumpkin-shaped bucket in tow, and he caught us off guard. He could see me right through the front window. Ben answered the door, knowing full well we have no trick-or-treat friendly foods in the house. Awkward conversation ensued, I scrambled around the house and the only thing I could find that could pass as a Halloween treat was an intact 250g block of Whittaker’s 72% Dark Ghana dark chocolate that I had planned to make a chocolate brownie with, so I handed him that with a nod and a “sorry, we’re a shit flat” to his mother. She looked at me with disdain. After that I closed the curtains and took refuge upstairs. The last two sets of ghouls walked away empty-handed. Whether they toilet papered my front gate or not I did not know as I was stranded on the landing in the dark. It was my own fault – I should’ve thought ahead, living in a somewhat upper-middle-class, family-friendly area where children are bound to have adopted this American tradition, and having a boyfriend with a son in the trick-or-treating age bracket.

So how is this all relevant?

Sitting there, hiding from a bunch of tweens covered in facepaint and alone with my thoughts, a question popped into my mind: “Am I anti-children?”

For over a month and a half I have been ignoring this blog and pretending it doesn’t exist. This has been made especially easy as I don’t have a laptop at the moment (and haven’t for months) and I went to Europe on holiday and then I’ve been busy at work so at times I’ve forgotten that I even had a blog in the first place. The long stints of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ have been interspersed with occasional periods of feeling guilty and like a lazy piece of shit every time it gets mentioned or if someone asks me about it. The whole experience is akin to the feeling you get when you’ve got a pile of washing or you know you have to go to the dentist and the thing needs doing and you know it will be really great if you just do it but also you’re like, nah if I put the washing in my boyfriend’s kids room and shut the door I can’t see it and then I don’t have to put any effort into thinking about it. Like I said, out of sight really is out of mind.

So why am I here, now?

Two things happened. Well, three. The first was that I thought of a thing I wanted to write about, a kind of stupid thing I remembered that happened ages ago that I always thought was a weird thing that people might like to hear about, and then the second thing was that I was getting dressed after having a spa in the changing rooms of the Next Generation Lifestyle Club or whatever they call it, and this girl comes up to me and says “are you KatherineIsAwesome?” and immediately I felt so bad like, fuck, for starters I’m not wearing any makeup at all and I have a giant ‘period pimple’ (or at least that’s what Lani called it) on my chest and I’m standing here in a bra, and then there’s the fact that this person knows my blog exists and I haven’t put shit up there, I am really the worst, zit-covered, laziest blogger of all time. Today was the final straw. About 7 minutes before I started this post, a thing popped up in my Facebook feed, and it was about how Maddy Budd had posted a blog post and then I was like, jesus christ, if Maddy can get her act together and do a million other things in New York, I surely am the absolute, absolute worst.

So now here I am, it’s 4.29pm and I’m at my real job using my work computer and I’m going to just tell you about the thing that happened ages ago that I just remembered. I mean, the story is kind of a non-story but hey, take from it what you will.

James took some photos for twenty-seven names for their NZFW exhibition and I really love them so I have decided to post them. They are some of James’ best work, in my opinion. Very beautiful. They were up at the Allpress Gallery on Drake Street for a couple of days but they are gone now (cool story). They were sitting alongside a blurb about the whole thing which I also really love and have reproduced here:

“Last year we dreamed big, inviting Emma Watson, Beyoncé and Helen Clark to our dinner party. We still haven’t heard back from them yet, maybe their RSVPs got lost in the post, maybe their calendars were a bit tight…? This year, we decided to look closer to home for a higher hit rate. It’s not always about the stars of your favourite Netflix show, or the movers and shakers, or the people winning those gold medals. More often, we’re inspired by our friends, our sisters, our team, our mothers. We took the twenty-seven names team on a road trip with James K. Lowe, and these photographs are the result. Against the ever-inspiring backdrops of Te Henga (Bethells Beach) and Woodhill forest, we see that even in the same clothes we are all individuals. Each of us brings our own stories and our own beauty to the mix: the hair we hated as a teenager, the freckles we tried to wash off. Why couldn’t we have pencil thin eyebrows like everyone else? Whatever it was that made us different, we wanted to change it. But our mums were right, dammit! That difference is where the beauty lies. Maybe loving these things about ourselves is something that comes with age (like a taste for early nights and a plush dressing gown) but maybe it shouldn’t have to. If we can see ourselves in the photographs, in the clothes, we can see that perfection isn’t a prerequisite to beauty. Your eye might jump to that thing you hate to see reflected in a photograph, but what happens when you look for a little longer? And what would happen if, instead of asking “How do I look?” we asked “What will I do today?”